We are pleased to announce the release of a new community forum group focused on Best Practices in App Building. This new section of the community will focus on the three primary areas for successful app building: Data, Build, and Design. We are sure this will help app-makers to optimize the success of their apps as well as give all community experts an opportunity to showcase best practices and lessons learned. We are also developing badges, swag rewards, as well as special ‘insider’ advantages for contributing members who add value, and who help others to succeed using PowerApps.

Recently I volunteered to create a calendar app that we could use to share events across our organization, especially in the areas of Diversity and Inclusion. The target goal was to enable us to broadly share relevant events, but to allow consumers of the app to select ‘which’ events they would like added to their calendars. This was a really fun project that I was able to finish on a plane flight from DC to Seattle. Learn how I expedited this app with a little bit of planning...

We were so excited to release a way for you to connect to Document Libraries and other list items like Task Lists and Calendars! This opens a wealth of new opportunities to app makers for enhanced business applications.

Please join us in celebrating three new feature experiences for PowerApps, Power BI, and Microsoft Flow automation. We are thrilled to share these opportunities for innovation in application design, analytics, and automation - directly from our seats at the Data Insights Summit in Seattle!

We are happy to announce a suite of new features which come directly from your ideas and suggestions around faster app builds, and a more user friendly experience! Please join me in evangelizing the following six (6) top feature releases this month!

Data Validation within apps and business forms is critical to prevent errors, and to ensure data transactions occur without errors and uncomfortable bottlenecks during submission. In this blog I will be sharing my personal best practices for data validation in the PowerApps that I design. I hope these will help you to enhance your organization's PowerApps too.

This new app sample was inspired by someone who posted a Forum Idea regarding PowerApp Themes. We really enjoy reading all the forum ideas, and I refer to those who post ideas as our enthusiastic “innovators”. This particular innovator came up with the idea that we should expose our “Themes” (see screen shot below) to the consumer of the app (aka the person running the app), and not only to the designer (or app maker). What an awesome idea! It really shows that they appreciate Empathic Design. Empathic Design is a process that one of my past managers (Karuana Gatimu) has instilled in me. It is a user-centered design approach that pays attention to the user's feelings toward a product. As I thought about this further, I realized that this could also be even more relevant in mobile app design because factors around mobility can affect the way we format the screen; low light, screen glare, etc. depending on where the person is when they are running the app. It also could apply to accessibility, especially for people like me who always wants to make the font size bigger! So, will all those good reasons in mind, I decided to see if I could create my own configurable theme, using the features and formulas that are already in PowerApps today. I love what I ended up with, and I hope you will too! (Please let me know if you expand upon this idea for your own PowerApps in the comment area below.)

Last week Carlos gave us an excellent example of a tabbed format within a tablet format PowerApp. Check it out here:: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/design-tips-part-1-handling-tab-control-scenarios-in-powerapps-for-full-screen-formats/. This is another example of a tabbed format for mobile phones. The design is by Mehdi Slaoui Andaloussi who is ingenious when it comes to PowerApps patterns. I've enjoyed using this format as well because it's quick, easy to configure, and data driven.

Inspired by our SharePoint MVPs, PowerApps Engineering Manager Carlos Aguilar Mares offers this really practical design for PowerApp business form designers looking for a "Tabbed User Interface" to save space on a wide format application. I enjoyed learning from Carlos and documenting the steps he took to make this happen. Later this week I will post a Part 2 on this topic, which will demonstrate my own tabbed UI design option that would work best for mobile phones which have less space to work with.

Best Practices for PowerApp Icons Are you considering the design of your app icons when publishing new PowerApps in your organization? Based on industry standards, app icons can be more important than meets the eye! Let’s take a few moments this week and think about the importance of app icons.